Dangers and Rewards of the Home-Garden

I am amazed by the thought process of some readers who go to great lengths to convince me that raising a garden is not a viable survival strategy. After all, having a garden makes you a target, hungry people want food and will rob you of your harvest; they warn.

A Yellowstone eruption or asteroid strike could put enough dust  into the atmosphere that you would not be able to even raise a garden for several years; they’ve warned. Yep, this is true – but what is the point?

If you do not plant a garden for fear of having it taken or destroyed you are guaranteed to produce nothing. If you are raided by looters or government thugs and they are able to take your crop you have nothing.

I would rather spend a little time planning and planting with the possibility of getting a harvest, then do nothing and guaranteeing failure. By this logic someone with more support and firepower could take your food storage, should we not store food because we could lose it?

This is non-sense, why avoid planting a garden because you are afraid it will be taken? I am not saying it will not happen, it could; but there are steps that can be taken to minimize the risk after a long-term collapse. Like not planting in rows, using the three sisters or growing in a secret greenhouse .

We can learn a lot from the marijuana growers, who come up with some ingenious ways of hiding their illegal crop from authority’s. Around here growing weed used to be big business (now it’s pain pills), growers hid their fields deep in the forest and under the cover of indoor grow rooms.

Every fall the police would adorn their camouflage BDU’s, and head to woods in search of the illegal plants, state police and National Guard choppers would fly overhead searching for the gardens. Yet they found only a small amount of what is out there and they very seldom made an arrest. It always seemed strange to me that they only seek out the fields when it’s harvest time when the buds where ripe and ready for harvest…

Post collapse hiding our food crops could be requisite to filling our gut with fresh produce. Somehow the idea of consuming only ground wheat gruel, day after day – month after month doesn’t seem very appealing. Combined with beans it will keep you alive, but after six or eight months of this diet you will die of boredom if nothing else. You’ll need fresh produce and meat…

Grains can be sprouted and young sprouts eaten raw or dried and ground into a flour providing some nutrient content not found in the basic grain, sprouting is an excellent survival technique and one you should use, but nothing beats fresh corn, squash or green beans to fill, that empty spot in your stomach.

My grandfather remembers the Great Depression, he said they survived because they raised a huge garden putting up the surplus to live on through the winter. We should do the same…

One year he recalls the garden getting hit by a drought and subsequent attacks by locust. You can still see that look of pain and uneasiness in his eyes and on his face when he recalls going to bed hungry nearly every night that year.

I think the potential rewards of the survival garden outweigh any potential risk of it being looted and taken. Don’t you?

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